Some updates here regarding the legal battle over the inheritance of Nina Wang’s billion-dollar estate:
According to reports from Hong Kong, it has been suggested that she had signed over her vast fortune to a feng shui master after he promised her eternal life.
At Monday’s hearing in Hong Kong’s High Court, barrister Geoffrey Vos accused Tony Chan of using his influence to deceive Wang into leaving him her fortune. “We say (Tony Chan) lied to the deceased by telling her that performing certain feng shui practices – including putting his name in her will – would ensure that she would live forever, or at least a very long time.”
Justice Johnson Lam, hearing the case, said he would not have his court turned into a “court of feng shui”, but Vos assured the judge that any feng shui references would be aimed at showing whether Chan’s advice was legitimate or merely an attempt to gain control of Wang’s money. An eight-week hearing is expected to start after Easter next year.
In return, Chan’s barrister accused the family company Chinachem of withholding medical evidence that would shed light on Wang’s state of mind before she died. Also at issue is whether a lawyer and a senior Chinachem executive had each signed a copy of a will that Chan claimed gave him legal title to her estate.
Nina Wang Kung Yu-Sum, formerly Asia’s richest woman, died of cancer in April last year and the existence of two conflicting wills is complicating the inheritance of her estate estimated at more than $12 billion.Tony Chan, a businessman and feng shui enthusiast, claims to be the sole beneficiary of Wang’s estate based on her last will, drafted in 2006 as she lay dying. But Wang’s family lays claim to an earlier 2002 will which would share her fortune between charities and family members.
With no children of her own, Wang wrote a new will in 2006, two years after her ovarian cancer was diagnosed, making 48-year-old Chan her sole beneficiary. She died shortly after winning an eight-year legal battle over the fortune of her husband, Teddy, which she inherited after he was kidnapped in 1990 and later declared dead when no trace of him was ever found. She had built his company, Chinachem, into a multi-billion-dollar business empire but initially lost a probate battle with her elderly father-in-law.
In a 2002 hearing, the High Court heard claims that Nina Wang had an affair in the 1960s that led Teddy to write her out of his will, though they remained married. Appeals court judges initially ruled she had probably forged the will of her late husband and, after the ruling, police charged Nina Wang with forgery.
The charges were dropped later after Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal overturned the probate decision and ruled there was no evidence to support the claim that Wang had forged the will. Despite her enormous wealth, Wang, who had her hair in pigtails and wore mini-skirts well into her 60s, was notoriously frugal, once claiming she needed only around $400 a month to live.